


First Impressions (Are Not to be Trusted)

by IvyOnTheHolodeck



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-23
Updated: 2016-07-23
Packaged: 2018-07-26 03:55:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7559143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IvyOnTheHolodeck/pseuds/IvyOnTheHolodeck
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos’s van wheezes crossly as it pulls into town, doors crusted with orange sand, a half dozen college students crammed into a vehicle too small for them with “Some Budding Yeast I Used To Grow” blasting out the rolled-down windows for the fifth time in an hour. Carefully, Carlos pulls into a parking lot next to the first pizza place he sees, puts the van in park, and rubs his eyes. His undergraduates are squabbling again about the relative merit of Bioinformatics and Chem 101A, and after eight and a half hours of driving, Carlos can’t take it any more.</p><p>“Guys. I am going to bring our equipment into the building we’ll be renting while we’re here. You are going to go buy pizza.” He tugs his wallet out of his pocket and tosses it to Jia Hui. “You may join me after buying pizza. You may not join me until you have bought pizza. Not before pizza. Not during pizza. After pizza. Understand?” He cracks a smile and gestures for Nils to open the van door. “Now scoot.”</p><p>His undergraduates scoot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	First Impressions (Are Not to be Trusted)

**Author's Note:**

> I love the idea of Carlos struggling to manage a group of unruly lab assistants while trying to figure out whether Cecil is teasing him. 
> 
> Feedback is appreciated, since I'm pretty new at this. :)

Carlos’s van wheezes crossly as it pulls into town, doors crusted with orange sand, a half dozen college students crammed into a vehicle too small for them with “Some Budding Yeast I Used To Grow” blasting out the rolled-down windows for the fifth time in an hour. Carefully, Carlos pulls into a parking lot next to the first pizza place he sees, puts the van in park, and rubs his eyes. His undergraduates are squabbling again about the relative merit of Bioinformatics and Chem 101A, and after eight and a half hours of driving, Carlos can’t take it any more.

“Guys. I am going to bring our equipment into the building we’ll be renting while we’re here. You are going to go buy pizza.” He tugs his wallet out of his pocket and tosses it to Jia Hui. “You may join me after buying pizza. You may not join me until you have bought pizza. Not before pizza. Not during pizza. After pizza. Understand?” He cracks a smile and gestures for Nils to open the van door. “Now scoot.”

His undergraduates scoot.

Carlos takes a deep breath, closing his eyes and leaning his scalp back against the headrest, allowing a satisfied grin to curl at the corners of his mouth. He’d spent the last nine months struggling for permission to perform this study, wrangling a research fellowship he technically wasn’t supposed to have, somehow organizing the intellectual talent of a group of unruly college students to be his lab assistants, accidentally tripping down a flight of stone stairs (and it was an accident, no matter what Jones said, Jones hadn’t been there and didn’t know what she was talking about), and bursting into the vice president in charge of instruction’s office armed with a schnauzer and a seismograph. (To be fair, the schnauzer had mostly been a coincidence. Mostly.)

The fight has finally paid off: Carlos has made it to the spaciotemporal anomaly that for years has been melting his sensors, the last one collapsing into a pool of faintly pulsing pink ooze that hums atonally on alternate Sundays.

“You left them rather a lot of loopholes, you know.”

Startled, Carlos glances out the van window at a remarkably pale man about his age. The man is studying a newspaper, his eyes downcast, but Carlos assumes he must have been the one who spoke, so he asks tentatively, “What do you mean?”

“Your instructions left them a number of loopholes to exploit, if they chose. They could have joined you through the pizza, or around the pizza, or possibly under the pizza. Big Rico may still be offering time-independent slices on cancelled Wednesdays. Do you remember if today has been cancelled?”

“Excuse me?”

“My memory of the last week was wiped three hours ago during a re-education seminar with the Sheriff’s Secret Police. Have you been re-educated recently? Their new premises are quite nice, I must say, and the floating bloodstone amphitheater is a remarkably aesthetic touch.”

Carlos suddenly realizes that the man is holding his newspaper sideways. “Um…”

“Proper ambiance during chanting is everything, you must admit. Ikea has some truly tasteful arrangements, if you survive the screaming mushroom section. Have you-” The man finally looks up at Carlos and stops dead in the middle of his sentence. His mouth drops open.

After waiting about thirty seconds, Carlos prompts, “Have I…?”

The man starts. “Oh! I was going to ask if you’d ever eaten screaming mushroom pizza, but you - ah, you’re new. To here. To Night Vale, that is. Which is here. So I’m guessing you haven’t. Um.” His pale skin has gone even whiter, with a possible - lilac? - tint. “Your hair…”

Carlos winces. He knows he must look bedraggled and sweaty from his long (long, long) drive, but he hadn’t thought he’d be _that_ horrifying. Still, he pulls open the car door and steps out, trying for a charming grin. His sisters always used to tell him he has a nice smile. “You’re right, I’m new here. My name is Carlos. I’m a scientist.”

Oookay, so that clearly didn’t work. The man’s amethyst eyes open even wider, and he drops his newspaper. Carlos grabs for it, but the man does at the same time, and their heads collide with a resounding crack. Carlos winces, raising his hand to his head and about to apologize, but apparently cranial trauma is all the man needs to start talking again. “Oh, I’m so sorry. Did I hurt you? I’m Cecil, Cecil Palmer. You’ll probably - I mean, you have a radio? You’ll probably hear me later.” He starts backing up. “You’re a scientist? That’s, that’s really neat, but, ah, you probably have science to do. I should - I should go…over there.” He spins on his heel and positively flees, his shadow stretching out - Carlos blinks - in the wrong direction behind him.

Well, that may not have been his smoothest introduction, but he’s got his first topic for study.

~

Over the course of the first day, Carlos hears his name shouted so often that he develops a standard response.

“Carlos! The sky just started raining salt!”

“Start taking measurements! Nils, grab a pair of binoculars and make sure no one’s dumping it out of a helicopter or anything. Yes, that includes so-called angels!”

“Carlos! One of the houses in the Desert Creek development doesn’t exist!”

 “Start taking measurements! Everyone, pack your equipment. We’re heading to Desert Creek. Dave, have you seen my map? The one that didn’t spontaneously catch on fire?”

“Carlos! The seismograph says we’re experiencing huge earthquakes, but I don’t feel any!” 

“Start taking measurements! Jia Hui, compare the spare seismograph’s readings. Identical? Check again at the end of the street, but be careful, the street ends in a yawning abyss - just go up to the edge. No, don’t wait until it’s more awake. Good lord, look at those wave patterns!”

“Carlos! The sun is setting ten minutes early!” 

“Start taking measurements! Stan, place all timepieces on the lab table next to the grandfather clock. Yes, a portable sundial would be perfect.”

“Carlos! You’re on the radio!”

“Start taking measurements! Rachelle - wait, what?”

Stan and Nils are bent over the portable radio they’ve balanced between two Erlenmeyer flasks on a lab bench, fiddling with the knob. Nils had apparently received the radio as part of a “survival kit” (which also included a bag of gummy worms and half a brick) for being Big Rico’s seven-hundred-forty-two-thousand-nine-hundred-and-thirty-third guest. Sure enough, a familiar ebony voice is emanating from the speaker, describing that afternoon’s press conference.

_That new scientist we now know is named Carlos called a town meeting._

“So that’s what he meant when he said I’d hear him later,” Carlos says. Cecil’s voice is - well, honestly, it’s amazing, rich and dark and smooth. His undergraduates shush him.

_Old Woman Josie brought corn muffins, which were decent, but lacked salt. She said the angels had taken her salt for a godly mission, and she hadn’t yet gotten around to buying more. Carlos told us that we are, by far, the most scientifically interesting community in the US -_

“Well, it’s very kind of Mr. Palmer to report on our meeting-”

_He grinned, and everything about him was perfect, and I fell in love instantly._

Carlos blinks.

_Government agents from a vague, yet menacing, agency were in the back watching. I fear for Carlos. I fear for Night Vale. I fear for anyone caught between what they know and what they don’t yet know that they don’t know. We received a press release this morning. The Night Vale Business Association is proud to announce -_

His undergrads exchange a look as Cecil moves on. Carlos stares at the radio. Cecil didn’t - he didn’t just -

The likeliest possibility is that Cecil, for reasons unknown, is mocking him. Carlos isn’t sure what he’s done to merit public humiliation - it’s not like he’d been staring at Cecil _that_ much, despite his striking purple eyes and razor cheekbones and gorgeous voice and _shut up, Carlos’s brain, that’s not helping_ \- but no matter what, Carlos is a professional. He can handle this.

And if there’s even the slightest chance Cecil is serious -

Nils and Stan are watching him, waiting for a reaction. Carlos squares his shoulders. “Turn up the volume, please, and let’s get back to work.”

~

The weirdest part - and that’s something, Carlos is quickly discovering, that you don’t say lightly in this town - is that the rest of Night Vale plays along with Palmer’s probably-joke. They throw significant looks at him, which hurt a bit on impact, grin and hum when they notice him heading toward the radio station, and are thoroughly preoccupied taking photographs of his hair. (Not him, but his hair, which makes for interesting camera angles.)

When Carlos visits the radio station, he focuses on his Geiger counter rather than the radio host, who has evidently gotten over his awkwardness from this morning and is now preoccupied with asking Carlos out. Carlos doesn’t pay attention, too busy being horrified that the station contains enough radioactive materials to annihilate the city. Equally disturbing is the fact that he can’t tell anyone.

“Mr. Palmer, your station is full of ~~radioactive~~ materials.”

“Materials? Really? What kind? Would you like to tell me about it over coffee?”

“I said ~~radioactive~~ materials. ~~Radioactive~~ materials. ~~Radioactive~~ materials!” He’s saying the word, but it’s refusing to exit his mouth. Is his tongue rebelling? Can the - who did Cecil say were “re-educating” him, somebody’s secret police? - censor people’s spoken words?

Cecil doesn’t seem concerned about Carlos’s loss of free speech. “Tea, maybe? The Pinkberry just received a new shipment of prescient leaves.”

“You have to evacuate the station!” Carlos turns and flees, dodging around the intern sorting piles of glitter on the floor. The glitter is chittering. Being in here is certainly deadly, and hesitating could be disastrous, but - Looking to the intern for permission, Carlos scoops a bit of sparkling powder into a test tube. It chirps at him. He corks the tube, stuffs it into his lab coat pocket, and dashes out the door.

Cecil calls after him. “Say tomorrow, at five o’clock?”

Carlos doesn’t respond.

He doesn’t respond when a crowd of lightly feathered preteens coalesces outside their lab and starts taking yet more photos of him. He doesn’t respond (well, no more than a faint smile) when Nils reports that Cecil described their encounter over the air mere minutes after it happened, rhapsodizing about how “perfect and beautiful” Carlos is.

He does respond when Rachelle shrieks, her crucible having transformed into a crawfish that is hanging off her nose. 

He does have to remind Dave to take Cecil’s less-than-flattering description of their scientific activities in stride.

“He said we were sitting around a clock, murmuring and cooing. We were _not_ murmuring and cooing.” Dave moodily pours twenty milliliters of hydrogen peroxide into the beaker Carlos is holding. “Muttering, maybe. Taking notes on the pendulum’s erratic swinging, yeah, definitely.”

Carlos drops a clean stir rod into the beaker, measures in three grams of the glitter, and places the beaker on a stir plate. “Not everyone is going to understand our science,” he reminds his underling. “One of the great challenges of science, particularly the theoretical physics you want to study, is making it accessible to laypeople. And you just reminded me - Jia Hui!” The goggled undergrad glances up from her lab notebook. “Have you translated the clock’s message yet?”

She shakes her head, brown ponytail swinging. “It’s definitely Morse Code, but the letters seem more like, like a wail than an actual message.” She pauses, staring past him. “Carlos, your beaker.”

The hydrogen peroxide has crystallized into a tiny mauve rabbit. Carlos sighs. “All right, everyone. I think that’s enough for the night.”

The sense of relief from his undergrads is a little too literal for comfort - it tastes of cotton candy on a hot summer evening - as they quickly lock down the lab and all potentially toxic chemicals in case the seismic activity suddenly manifests. Carlos lingers after his scientists have fled, scrubbing the last of his glassware with a ragged green hand towel. A smile quirks at the corner of his mouth.

This is going to be even more interesting than he’d hoped.


End file.
